I was there to view an exhibition of paintings and photography by the Irish artist Sean Scully. As I walked around the five rooms, all concrete and space and shuffling, I felt distracted – by other visitors, noise, the whisperings of the security guards. With the exception of one or two pieces I felt at odds with the exhibits.

Pablo Picasso, 1916Pic: Amedeo Modigliani (detail from photograph)

Any connection I felt was faint, dipping in and out.

Bored, and somewhat annoyed, I left. As I did so, and with time to kill, I noticed the Gallery’s display of works from its permanent collection. Figuring I’d have a quick glance at the Gallery’s heavy-hitter, The Taking of Christ, I stepped in.

The Caravaggio was there, along with a wealth of other paintings from the 15th to the 20th centuries. It made for a pleasant, if not soul-grabbing, 20 minutes.

Then, as I was preparing to leave, there it was. Near the final room and amid a clutch of 20th century works, hung Still Life with a Mandolin. Perspective bending and saturated with Mediterranean colour the painting seizes attention. Minutes passed as I attempted to trace my way around Pablo Picasso’s work – over the bowl of fruit, across the wine bottle, up through the silhouette of the trees outside.

It left an impression as vivid at the light of Juan-Les-Pins – even though it’s a night still-life.

Picasso created the work at Juan-Les-Pins in the summer of 1924, a year after Cubism had been declared dead. Not so, he painted.

But a biography of the work is inessential. As Eno indicated, the value of standing before Still Life with a Mandolin lies outside the painting, in the emotions I/you feel.

Life, light, summer, music, wine, fruit – all the good, true and important things are here, breath and beat and bloom.

The painting’s on display until the end of the year. Have a look – it may trigger something.

And of that colossal ruin, boundless and buried, the lone and level jungle stretched far away. Of imperial dreams and dead men, all that remained was long grass.

Will we be remembered after our deaths? Our legacy, for most of us, will be confined to the memories of loved ones and friends. As they pass, so what remains of us ebbs away.

Our grandchildren may remember us, our great-grandchildren may read our names half a century hence, but by then they’ll likely be meaningless, small notches in history. Traces.

The lines above are from Richard Flanagan’s The Narrow Road To The Deep North, a novel which depicts the experience of Australian prisoners of war forced to build the notorious Burma Death Railway in the Second World War.

Memory is at the core of the book – the soldiers’ memories of home during their imprisonment and their memories of the railway, and each other, decades later, as men in the last light of life.

In as much as it can be relied on, memory is a finite thing, a resource that runs down, like our years.

POWs laying track at Ronsi, Burma in 1943.

And so a great human outrage – the construction of a railway though 415 km of murderous tropical terrain in just 11 months at the cost of 160,000 lives – fades in the mind. Even this, an experience more deserving of remembrance than most, one of mankind’s brutal catastrophes, slips away.

It exists in commemorations, in records and in pictures. But these are impressions, facsimiles of reality. Even the men who lived it, as Flanagan depicts them, find it hard to remember all the details as they approach the end of their lives.

Reading Flanagan’s book leaves one with a realisation. If the memory of an event wich as the building of the Burma Railway, and the men involved, fades what hope is there that any of us will be remembered after we pass?

This weekend, after 50 years of music and two decades on from the death of Jerry Garcia, the original members of the Grateful Dead will take to the stage for the last time.

Fans at Chicago’s Soldier Field – some of whom paid $11,000 for their general admission ticket – can expect a blueprint Dead performance: four hours of music, built around the jazz-inflected solos and space rock jams that the band’s become renowned for over the past half century.

For some it’s the end of an era, one rooted in a 1960s San Francisco that seems impossibly distant from 2015. For others it’s ‘did they not wrap up years ago’?

For those of us in between, it’s a case of mild nostalgia leading to a dig through the archives.

Or, as WH Auden wrote on the death of earlier cultural giant: “A few thousand will think of this day
as one thinks of a day when one did something slightly unusual”.

My own interaction with the Dead’s music is, by a fan’s standards at least, lamentably limited. In fact it’s mainly based around two albums, a pair of stripped-down acoustic recordings released within five months of each other in 1970 – Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty.

Both were recorded at a time when the band was under financial and other pressures – Phil Lesh later recounted how Robert Hunter’s lyrics to Box Of Rain were inspired by the terminal illness of Lesh’s father.